1 - Free credits
2 - No one ever got fired for buying IBM
3 - AWS is sold to CTO/CIOs. AWS is a massive marketing and sales success
4 - An entire job type has sprung up around cloud-complexity. These people have a vested interest is staying on cloud.
5 - Growing number of people think the choice is exclusively between cloud or colo.
6 - Entire generations brought up on cloud: a lot of people don't realize just how expensive cloud is.
Ah, so true. Heroku was my "solution" for so long, when its really so expensive on its own. All the pricing models are so messed up.
I have some Digital Ocean nodes at either $5 or $20/mo, I need to shut those down.
Deploying stuff that can communicate to other stuff is so easy right now and so cheap ... somewhere. Vercel to the rescue, for now.
The same people who know it’s expensive seem to not know how cheap it is.
It's literally pennies in some cases, vs. renting a server that sits idle 99% of the time.
Besides, you could either rent a $5/month VPS that you know will always be $5/month, or you can use AWS Lambda and never know what your bill is gonna be at the end. Your new blogpost hit frontpage of HN? Good news, your bill is now $40 for this month.
Most (85% maybe) of my clients I work with want consistent costs over cheaper costs.
You know whats expensive in AWS. S3 Storage. Got some odd ~500TB stored in there. But at 6k/m I can't imagine trying to keep that in dedicated hardware. Atleast in S3 I feel it's safe.
Not always. People on the ground push for cloud stuff because it makes their lives easier and they are used to it from their side projects (where they, more likely than not, used the generous free credits).
It's just like back in ye olde days when all you needed to do to get a copy of Photoshop was the official installer and a keygen... Adobe didn't invest much in marketing and didn't do much against piracy until the end of CS6/the rise of CC, simply to become the universal industry standard.
I helped a niche API-as-a-service company go from -20% margins to being profitable. How? Moving away from AWS to Hetzner.
Yes your monthly bill is lower, but now the liability is all yours.
There are other options than the two that you've described - namely VPS providers and dedicated providers.
Can you help me understand why you thought those were the only two options? Maybe people who joined the industry after, say ~2010, were primarily exposed only to AWS?
Once more, it’s not like AWS is absolutely nothing. Chances are that any web-based startup would indeed be able to take advantage of the many autoscale-as-a-service features of AWS, enabling them to handle the next quarterly 100x increase in customers and throughout.
because triple++ digit margins enable cloud service providers to allocate vast amounts of money towards marketing.
My point is that you can't outsource reputational damage and blame.
My customers don't have a contract with AWS. A service they're paying for is down, and what am I going to do about it?
But they can sue you to bankruptcy if you mess up with their data. And these incidents happen way too frequently, even to big players, to ignore them.
You cannot casually say I am able to setup a Linux box myself, no need to hire experts / outsource this task to experts.